MediaTek outs royalty-free cross-device sharing tech

MediaTek has recently announced what it says is a novel cross-device sharing technology that is royalty-free and open to all comers called. Dubbed by the company as "CrossMount," MediaTek added that the "new industry standard" simplifies sharing of multimedia content among multiple devices.

More important, it allows the hardware and software resources in devices such as smartphones, tablets and TVs, for example to be shared and combined to add features or improve performance, explained Kevin Jou, MediaTek's CTO.

"We aren't just talking about Digital Living Network Alliance (DLNA) type of applications such as sharing content by pairing two devices. We are talking about connecting multiple devices (more than one) and enabling something way better than DLNA," said Jou.

MediaTek has been credited for innovative business practices. Its complete turnkey solutions have taken the Chinese smartphone market by storm. But with CrossMount, the Taiwan company is proposing a new industry standard for software and hardware resource sharing, as a technology leader, not as a follower.

"It's a new concept that no other chip companies, Qualcomm and Broadcom included, have ever talked about before," Jou noted.

The foundation of CrossMount is fairly straightforward. "CrossMount is built on top of Universal Plug and Play (UPnP)," Jou explained. Just as DLNA leverages UPnP, CrossMount uses UPnP as its foundation for media management, discovery and control.

Asked how much of the CrossMount technology has been developed, Jou stated that some functions of the technology, a year in the making, are embedded as "hooks" into MediaTek's latest chips scheduled for rollout in H2.

Jou offered several examples for resource sharing with CrossMount.

With this technology, a hardware function available on one device, such as a microphone on a phone, can be added to another device, such as a TV without a mic, when they're connected, said Jou. CrossMount technology, in this instance, turns a TV into a voice-controlled device, by literally transferring microphone capability from a smartphone to a TV.